110 



growths, and not, as is too often the case, be merely living every 

 spring, to be followed with dying every winter. It may be true 

 that in some departments a change of policy in farming has been 

 pursued ; as for example less attention may have been paid to 

 £fuit and more to hay ; less to one kind of root and more ta 

 another ; but, as before hinted, the grand idea is that for rea- 

 sons Providential, and therefore sometimes beyond mortal com- 

 prehension, the resourses of mother earth are found to be 

 boundless and inexhaustible — we say sometimes beyond our com- 

 prehension, we might have put it stronger and say it is, 

 perhaps, generally so ; and yet, notwithstanding the whole 

 philosopy of ])lant growth has for ages been wrapped in dark- 

 ness as intense as midnight, the chemists have brought forward, 

 within a comparatively recent period, an accumulation of im- 

 portant and beautiful facts of amazing signification. And the 

 engouraging result is, these facts are not, as heretofore, lying 

 buried beneath the crucibles of the chemists, but the agricul- 

 tural world is now being blest with men who can appreciate 

 and appropriate them. So long as gentlemen can be found 

 who, like the accomplished owner of the Pickman Farm, are 

 willing to spend a part of every day actually in the field — if 

 not literally with book in hand, yet with the knowledge of it 

 in his head — reducing to practice great scientific truths, and 

 watching the progress and the results, and then, like him, com- 

 municaLing the whole without hesitation or reserve, so long is 

 there a bright future for the farmer. 



The Committee would distinctly call the attention of all wha 

 read the statement of Dr. Loring, to his remarks upon the 

 use of sand as a manure, recollecting, however, that much of 

 his farm is inclining to clay, or being decidedly so. In addi- 

 tion to the more palpable uses of the sand described by him is 

 the mechanical one of its uniting first with the manure itself, 

 thus opening, dividing and making a passage through it for the 

 rootlets long before they would otherwise find one ; but, also, 

 and more especially, carrying on this important operation of 

 dividing and pulverizing the tenacious soil itself. Look at a 



